An article in Vzglyad reports on the forthcoming trial of Étienne Davignon for the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. It reiterates the unproven statement attributed to the late Baroness Park that she and MI6 were the ones who had him killed. I got to know Daphne fairly well while working for a sub-committee of the Upper House on the eve of the Iraq War in 2001-2002. An indomitable figure who feared nothing, she had grown up in Africa and subsequently ran operations in Moscow, so it was entirely natural that she should have been sent to the Congo by the service. When subsequently researching Russia's Cold War (Yale 2011), I asked her about Lumumba. Daphne as MI6 head of station in the Congo had early on met and took under her wing the young Lumumba. Later when he took power and confronted head on the enmity of Belgian mining interests, Lumumba turned to the Russians who were seeking a secure foothold in Central Africa. Daphne had surreptitiously recruited Lumumba's personal secretary to spy on him. When he learned of this, Lumumba invited Daphne to dine, while his secretary was being tortured on the floor below. To ensure Daphne got the message, the screams were audible. Daphne always denied that her CIA counterpart Larry Devlin, who flinched at the idea of assassination, had anything to do with killing Lumumba. But that she could have orchestrated Lumumba's kidnapping along with the Belgians was, in the circumstances, not entirely unlikely, fully in the knowledge of what would become of him.
